Messaging for Engineering: From Research to Action

AuthorNational Academy of Engineering

TitleMessaging for Engineering: From Research to Action

PublisherNational Academies Press

Release DateJune 21, 2013

Copyright978-0-309-26180-7

Messaging for Engineering supports efforts by the engineering community to communicate more effectively about the profession and those who practice it. This report builds on the 2008 NAE publication, Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering (CTC), which presented the results of a research-based effort to develop and test new, more effective messages about engineering.

The new messages cast engineering as inherently creative and concerned with human welfare, as well as an emotionally satisfying calling. This report summarizes progress in implementing the CTC messages, but also recognizes that there is potential to galvanize additional action and thus suggests specific steps for major players in the engineering community to continue and build on progress to date. Many of the report's recommendations resulted from discussion at a December 2010 committee workshop that involved several dozen high-level decision makers representing key stakeholder groups in the engineering community.

This report is the final product of the Committee on Implementing Engineering Messages of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). This project had three objectives: (1) develop an online "toolkit" containing messaging-related resources, community building applications, and other resources to support the goal of promoting broader use of new messages for improving the public understanding of engineering, (2) facilitate dialog between organizations that have developed implementation strategies for the new engineering messages and influential stakeholders in the engineering community that have not yet implemented the messages, and (3) create an action plan to guide adoption and use of the online toolkit and encourage coordinated outreach to the public by the broader engineering community. Messaging for Engineering explains the action plan.